Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that when police attach a GPS device to someone's property, it "constitutes a search."

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The ruling, which marked the justices' first-ever review of GPS tracking, was unanimous. The justices divided, however, on how the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures applies to such high-tech tracking.

The case, which during November oral arguments prompted justices' references to George Orwell's futuristic novel 1984, ensures that police cannot use the Global Positioning System to continuously track a suspect before presenting sufficient grounds and obtaining a warrant from a judge.

Monday's decision specifically applies when police install a GPS tracking device on a person's car, but five justices suggested in concurring statements that a warrant might similarly be needed for prolonged surveillance through smartphones or other devices with GPS capabilities.

The Global Positioning System, originally developed for the military, relies on satellites that transmit to receivers that calculate the latitude and longitude of a location. A GPS device installed by police can be used to follow a person 24 hours a day. Data can be collected and analyzed far more efficiently and economically than if a team of agents followed a person.

The court reversed the cocaine-trafficking conviction of a Washington, D.C., nightclub owner. In 2005, police attached a GPS device to a Jeep owned by Antoine Jones while it was parked in a public lot. Agents then used evidence of Jones' travels over four weeks to help win the conviction on conspiracy to distribute cocaine.

Civil libertarians and defense lawyers praised the ruling in United States v. Jones. The "Fourth Amendment must continue to protect against government intrusions even in the face of modern technological surveillance tools," said Virginia Sloan, president of the Constitution Project, which was among the groups that sided with Jones. The Justice Department, which had appealed a lower court's decision requiring a warrant for GPS tracking, had no public response to the decision.

Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the main opinion for the court, said "the government's physical intrusion on the Jeep" to obtain information constitutes a search. He based his decision on the original roots of Fourth Amendment protection for property against government intrusions. Scalia was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor.

The four other justices, led by Samuel Alito, concurred only in the judgment for Jones. Alito said the case would be better analyzed by asking whether Jones' "reasonable expectations of privacy were violated by the long-term monitoring of the movements of the vehicle he drove."

Alito contended the attachment of the device was not itself an illegal "search." Rather, he said, what matters is a driver's expectation of privacy. "We need not identify with precision the point at which the tracking of this vehicle became a search, for the line was surely crossed before the 4-week mark," Alito wrote, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan.

Sotomayor, who fully joined Scalia's opinion, suggested in a concurring statement that she agreed with parts of Alito's analysis, which would cover privacy expectations not only when police affix a device but when no physical invasion occurred. That could cover when police access signals from a GPS-enabled smartphone.

"The bottom line is that any use of a GPS tracking device without a warrant would be highly risky for law enforcement," said Walter Dellinger, one of the lawyers who represented Jones.

Anthony Barkow, former director of the New York-based Center on the Administration of Criminal Law, which sided with the Justice Department, agreed. "Law enforcement will adjust and seek warrants" in all but emergency situations.

The Justice Department had argued that drivers do not expect their movements on public streets to be kept private, no matter the duration, so GPS tracking should not fall under the Fourth Amendment protections regarding searches and seizures. When the case was argued, Justice Department lawyer Michael Dreeben insisted that the government was not trying to obtain "24-hour surveillance of every citizen of the United States."

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